In the online advertising environment, advertisers try to market their product to many users by embedding their ads within various online contexts, such as web pages, videos, mobile apps, social networks, and the like. One general purpose of an advertiser is to reach the most receptive on-line audience in the right context at the right time, while minimizing their advertisement budget. The expectation is that the users who have seen these ads in particular contexts will either recognize the brands communicated by the ads or perform a desired action, such as buying an on-line product or clicking on the ad.
Publishers who provide online content to an audience of users often seek to sell advertisement space, referred to as impression opportunities, for displaying ads alongside the content. Bids for purchasing real-time impressions for placement of ads from different advertisers are often negotiated in real-time through real-time bidding (RTB) exchanges.
For each bid request, a high number of ads may be processed in a relatively short amount of time. Circa late 2013, the number of requests received by an ad request processing platform is more than a million per second and the total number of ads can be as high as 6.5 million. These numbers are expected to increase.